Entertainment

HOW TO: Get Your Social Media Story Featured on Mashable

Last year, we shared 12 tips for getting featured on Mashable, as well as 12 things not to do when seeking coverage. While most of these tips still hold true (and we still don’t have time for lunch meetings), a lot has changed in the last year, including the type of stories we typically cover on our site.

The bottom line remains the same: we want to hear from you and value our relationships with the social media community. There are, however, best practices for sharing your news with us that will both help you in terms of getting coverage, and help us in terms of telling your story. So, consider the following tips an addendum to our prior advice for getting our attention.

What we cover:

Mashable is “the social media guide.” Our news coverage consists primarily of important developments at key companies in the social media space – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Google, etc – and interesting things that brands, application developers, and entrepreneurs are doing with them. That translates into stories about third-party apps that leverage these platforms, innovative marketing techniques, and creative business models.

However, we still cover innovative startups that are doing unique things in the social media space outside of these core companies. Additionally, we are increasingly covering key mobile platforms – like iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry – and their intersection with social media.

How to submit your story:

The best way to submit your story remains by sending an email to news@mashable.com. Contacting us via social networks, Twitter direct message, our personal email addresses, or unsolicited by phone is still not the best option, especially for timely news. Beyond that, a few pointers:

1. As opposed to attachments, link us to relevant materials – screenshots, video demos, press releases, etc – on the Web. When appropriate, embeddable documents on services like DocStoc, Scribd, or SlideShare can also make great additions to a story.

2. Link us to your social media presence. If you have a Twitter account, a Facebook Page, or a YouTube channel, let us know! Increasingly, these channels are becoming the new RSS readers, and are a great way for us to keep up with your company on an ongoing basis.

3. Get social with invites. Invite codes are so 2000 and late. For example, check out what we did recently when HootSuite launched version 2.0 of its web-based Twitter management tool – rather than offer up an invite code, we awarded the first 100 people to retweet the post the invites. This lead to considerably more buzz for both our story and for the startup, with more than 1,000 tweets going out about the news.

Insider tips:

1. Submit to our Microsoft BizSpark program. This is our preferred method for covering new startups, yet most submissions still come in through our general mailbox. We cover one new startup per day through this program, so if you’ve never been featured on Mashable before, this is your best bet.

2. Submit on weekends. The weekends are notoriously slow for the news business, but we’re still hunting for interesting social media stories to cover. The volume of submissions we receive on Saturday and Sunday is also significantly lower than during the week, so it’s a great time to share an interesting story with us, large or small.

3. Follow us on Twitter! Ok, this is not all that insidery, but all of our authors and editors are highly active on Twitter, and it’s without a doubt the best way to build a relationship with us short of attending one of our events. The accounts for our editorial team are: @mashable@adamostrow@sharonfeder@benparr@franticnews@jbruin@catone.

Questions?

Anything else you want to know about working with Mashable to get your story covered? Let us know in the comments and we’ll do our best to respond.

Mashable
is a global, multi-platform media and entertainment company. Powered by its own proprietary technology, Mashable is the go-to source for tech, digital culture and entertainment content for its dedicated and influential audience around the globe.